?

Two weeks ago, the headlines were overflowing with the ethical debate about Terri Schiavo, a woman who after a temporary cardiac arrest at the age of 26, entered a "permanent vegetative state" and was the object of an ensuing 15-year legal battle between her parents and her husband over whether she should be kept alive or not. Her feeding tube was disconnected on March 18, 2005 and she died at the age of 41 thirteen days later.

All I could find in the news were rehashings of the parents' arguments against those of her husband, until I finally hit a Newsweek article that provided some background. More information can also be found at this link.

It is not my intention to discuss how moral or not Ms Schiavo's death was. Rather, there are a few questions that have arisen inside of me which I feel compelled to talk about, and your response is most welcome.

Some have written that this case underlines the importance of live wills. I feel that it is easy for someone to simply write down at 26 that if they were to be in a vegetative state, then they would rather die. Medical reports about Ms Schiavo state that her cerebral cortex had become scar tissue and brain fluid so that no cognitive activity was possible. That's pretty clear. But the brain stem was still alive. Do we know what new functions the brain stem can develop? Do we know whether a dead cerebral cortex means a dead consciousness?

But what if someone else got trapped into a body and could not hear or communicate, but could still see? What if that person, after having written that he would rather die in his will, suddenly discovered that, trapped inside, he could still feel, and would give anything for another glimpse of the sea? And that life was something more than what we all think, and that he still wanted to live? I don't know how dead Terri Schiavo's senses were. I'm trying to find more information, but there's little of it available. In the fictitious second case I mentioned, having drawn a will beforehand would still have been useless, even dangerous. What do we know about that state?

Who should decide? The person's chosen life-partner, the person's parents, God?

Another question is this: once the courts have decided that it's more humane for someone to die rather than to live in such a state (as was the case for the Schiavo case), isn't it also fair to say that the court should decide of a humane way for that death to happen, i.e., euthanasia? Why starve a person to death?

What was right, and what would be right in another case?

I don't know.